User:Charlinevalot/sandbox

This is my personal ATK sandbox. It is a collection of notes, observations and random thoughts on the four main interdisciplinary issues (history, truth, evidence, and power). A bit like a journal.

History
Physics : In our seminar, we were asked to search for the precise date of beggining of one discipline. I choose physics. Several dates came up : my partners and I said 1905 because it was a time of revolutionary breakthroughs (with Einstein's theories of relativity for ex) Around that time emerged the branches of modern physics as we know them today : cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics, mechanics, geophysics... However, when we shared our answer to the class, we realised that all the students came up with very different things. Some placed physics up to 4th century BC. And it's true that Aristotle already questioned matter and the movement of planets and pretended to do some experimentations. Other referred to Newton as the founder/the father of physics. We were then given more time to change our answers... Realised that a history is often rich and complex, it takes years of evolution before arriving to the current discipline in place today. This builds up hard rigid groundings within a discipline that are often hard to break (scientists like their traditions) History therefore is a real challenge in conducting interdisciplinary work and I was able to recognise and appreciate that during the seminar

Power
Power and interdisciplinarity:

Power has a huge importance in moulding the disciplines as we know them todays. Power is intrinsically linked to knowledge, for some say that "knowledge is power". Who provides the knowledge, who has access to it, who structures it, who officially recognise it, is entirely dependent on the figures of power in place. So it's a big issue.

In class, we gave the example of british history taught at University. White european males from privileged positions constructed our academic knowledge of british history and they minimised or sometimes completely silenced the importance of colonialsm. -- only recently challenged. Our lecturer Lauren Bird gave the example of "the worst course she'd ever taken" in British History and Identity. Her teacher mentioned Peek Frean's biscuits company as a unit of the course, but not a point was made about the rest of the British Empire, a that covered over 20% of the Earth's landmass, comprised 400M people for 2 centuries. Not a small bit for Great Britain.

Also, we defined a necessary feature of disciplines to be a branch of study that is RECOGNISED, FORMALISED, where you can get a DEGREE IN. An activity is organised around it to deepen its and set its boundaries (i.e. art is a discipline from the moment there are museums and expositions...) But that implies games of power. Who has a say in what is a discipline and what is not ? --> would be cool to find an example of a discipline that took time to be recognised. Gender/race studies are smthg recent I believe ? Someone in the first lecture : a parent's friend was refused publication of a paper that wasn't "scientific" enough but neither "social" enough

- definitely more information can be added about gender pay gaps, it's a good point to develop